Last night’s late night news on BBC2 (22/1/08) had five ‘experts’ pontificating on about the ‘business cycle’ and they spent around twenty minutes trying avoid explaining where Capitalism was headed and whether anybody or institution had any control over it. They failed miserably, talk about empty heads talking, it was an embarrassing display of denial, something the BBC is really good at,

‘Stock indexes are set to be highly volatile in coming weeks, they warned.’

Volatile? At least that’s what the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are telling us. Volatile is bank-speak for powerless.
If you judge the latest crisis of capital accumulation by the headlines in the ‘business’ section of the MSM, you could be excused for thinking that it’s all down to jittery investors what with statements like,

“The uncertainty about corporate earnings growth in 2008 has risen, not only in the financial sector,” said Matthias Schellenberg, managing director at ING Investment Management. “The markets are expecting a flood of profit warnings in the next few months.”

We have been living with the ‘boom and bust’
cycle of capitalism for centuries and whilst it’s true that that the
‘boom and bust’ cycle is intrinsic to capitalism, MSM ‘explanations’
for its causes are laughable. Take for example the BBC’s Q&A Webpage where we read under the heading ‘What can stop the falls [in the value of shares]?’

‘That's a tricky one.’

In other words, nothing can be done about it, followed by a series of
anodyne ‘answers’ to the question which reveal two things about
corporate media coverage of capitalist economics:

1. Never call a recession a recession, just keep on saying that it’s
‘around the corner, maybe’, a ridiculous response given that we are
already in a recession as any fool can see.

‘The
big question is whether we are just seeing a bad month for shares - or
whether this is the start of a bear market that could see share prices
sliding for years.’

So questions get answered with, you guessed it, more questions.

2. Blame it all on the ‘sub-prime mortgage’ scandal but don’t even begin to question the real cause of ‘cheap’ credit. The BBC’s Q&A page says,

‘All
of the problems were kicked off by record levels of defaults on
sub-prime mortgages in the US. ‘Sub-prime mortgages are [were] offered
to people with inferior credit records or unpredictable incomes.’

It goes onto say that,

‘It turned out that US lenders had been repackaging the debt and selling it to banks worldwide. The default levels meant that the repackaged debt was of questionable value.’

‘Questionable value? Repackaging? It turned out!’ But it stands to
reason that if you lend money to people who haven’t a hope in hell of
repaying it (as they were conned into the deals in the first place)
then the result is inevitable; repossessions and the inevitable
collapse of the housing market (and then some).

Contrast the BBC’s innocuous description of the situation with the following,

‘President
George W. Bush called for $145 billion in tax cuts, describing the
measures as a “shot in the arm” for the U.S. economy, which caused
stock values to plunge in Australia, Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, and
across Europe. “There's something approaching panic in the market,”
said an analyst with Bank of America.’

— Source: ‘The News Dissector’,
23 January, 2008

What the BBC doesn’t explain is its disengenuous description of bad debts
as ‘repackaging’, in other words, burying the damn things in financial
‘instruments’ so complex that nobody has any idea where these bad debts
actually are (devised by a bunch of greedy nerds with useless degrees
in economics and business ‘management’).

‘Fraud, corruption and racketeering went so deep as
to make an important contribution to the greatest single crisis the
United States faced during the 20th century — the Great Depression.’ —
‘Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global Rise of
Organized Crime’, p.54

Move over Halliburton, been there, done that.

But the real
cause can be traced back to the ‘de-regulation’ of the financial
markets and especially the banking sector. ‘De-regulation’ is just
news-speak for the legalisation of what used to be a crime and
obviously with good reason (remember the Savings & Loan crisis of
the 1980s? See my ‘Bush Family Connections: Silverado Savings & Loan Scandal’,
itself the first major effect of de-criminalising, sorry, deregulating
the laws governing the actions of the financial sector).

In
turn, it reveals the simple fact that capitalism is fundamentally a
criminal endeavor of grand proportions, one that makes the ‘Mafia’ a
bunch of amateurs (See ‘Selling the biggest lie of them all – Capitalism’, my review of ‘Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime’ by Michael Woodiwiss).
It was only because of the ‘29 Crash that under Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ the state imposed regulations
on the business ‘community’, for just as with today’s meltdown, the ‘29
Crash was caused in large measure by the criminal actions of the
capitalist class, the self-same laws that were abolished in the 1980s.
So what goes around, comes around eh.

‘The
number and variety of rackets in the United States during the 1920s and
early 1930s was vast. Many Americans knew or at least suspected that
politicians, judges, lawyers, bankers and business concerns collected
many millions of dollars from frauds, bribes and various forms of
extortion.’ — ‘Gangster Capitalism – The United States and the Global
Rise of Organized Crime’, p.47

The irony of ‘de-regulation’ is that it came about as a result of the last
major crisis of Capital, the so-called Energy Crisis of the early 1970s
and the falling rate of profit following the actions of countries like
IRAQ in nationalising their oil industry and of OPEC raising the price
of oil.

“Do we want the communists to own the banks, or the terrorists?” asked financial commentator Jim Cramer. “I'll take any of it.”

Neo-liberalism, letting the market decide and ‘de-regulation’ is just a
polite way of describing Gangster Capitalism or back to business as
usual before those damn Commies interfered with a good thing.

Thus the BBC, along with the rest of the capitalist press, dare not
speak the ‘credit crisis’ by its real name — Capitalism, nor obviously
the real history of ‘boom and bust’ lest we, the public finally cotton
to what’s going on and who will the pay the price, as ever, the poor of
the planet.

...
I find it curious that you never find any "hard truthes" about any society other than the United States. How is this any different from centuries of European peevishness that plainly assumed that their own shit doesn't stink?

Response to 'Recession'
Well, I have to disagree with about this, it just so happens that European shit does stink only not quite as much and these days, it doesn't stick to everything the same way US shit does. European imperialism largely belongs to another age (tho' not for the want of trying eg, Blair's insane desire to resurrect the British Empire).

And if you take the trouble to read other essays I've penned, you'll find that I do target European capitalists, but basically it comes down to the simple fact that US imperialism is the biggest shit of them all.